


Many Questions

by skamtrash8903



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Elio Perlman - Fandom, Gay - Fandom, cmbyn
Genre: Angst, Drama/Romance, Gay, Heartache, Long-Distance, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-28 06:25:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20421398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skamtrash8903/pseuds/skamtrash8903
Summary: Hello! This takes place many years after the end of the CMBYN novel. So Elio's father has passed and Oliver and Elio haven't had a reunion in a long time. Please enjoy





	Many Questions

It started. It ended. But did it really end, or was Oliver waiting outside of our Italian villa, yearning to knock but not having the courage to? Was he still standing there, espadrilles on his feet, puckering his lips at the thought of apricot juice? 

No, Elio. You're going to fantasize yourself into dust. He's gone. You saw him years ago. Had it been five years since the last time? Ten? Twenty? Oliver, Oliver, Oliver. Come back. You'll kill me if you stop. You'll kill me if you don't just come back and hold me. Elio, Elio, Elio. Rome is calling for us Oliver, can't you hear it?

The compulsory need to have him ravaged my body; his hand gripped me so many Italian summers ago, and yet I could still feel where his fingers had been. His love was a tattoo, his saliva the ink. Oliver has children now. He raises these children with a woman who gets to sleep next to him every night. I often wonder if she knows about me; did she ever suspect that he might not be as straight as he feigns to be? Did he, on a whim of remembrance and malt liquor, tell her about me? Did his children know about the man their father fucked in Italy? When I think about him recounting the amorous details, it makes me hard. The words simply leaving his lips would be stimulation to me, so much so that I believe I could feel it happening all the way in Italy. Actually, I'm certain I could feel it. My cock would twitch, and I'd know; I'd know that he is all the way across the sea thinking about me, and maybe that would be enough to prolong me for another fifteen years without him. 

Does he look into the mirror and call himself Elio?  
He assumes my name because he is me; he calls himself by my name because it's the only way he can make it through the day without melting into a broth of tan-skinned Rome and his knowledge of, well, everything. Would his wife find him, pooled out and liquified, and mop him up?

Wife. Oh, how I pity the word "wife". The mere four letters it takes to spell it, yet the role that lays behind it. What did being Oliver's wife ensue? Did she cook? Clean? Did she read his transcripts as I had done so long ago? Everything she does for him I would do with the bat of his eye and the flick of his fingers as they thumb through the pages of a book on Heraclitus. I would do anything for him. I would take Mafalda's apron and wear it, cook for him every day and every night, if that would give me the infinitesimal chance of being eternally his. Wife. A funny word. A funny title. To me she is Circe, imprisoning my Odysseus and keeping him from returning home; except, in that story he does return home, though in mine I feel the ending might be much different.

Oliver is the seed that plants itself in every move I make. I play piano, but only to bring myself back to the day I played young Bach for him; I smoke Gauloises, but only to remember how his lips tasted the night we met at midnight; I sleep in the guest bed when we return to Italy, just so I can imagine that his body still occupies my bed. I can still smell him; his skin is rougher now from the sunspots and the wear and tear of his age, but I know the smell is still the same. Indescribable is this smell, but I know it when I smell it. For Oliver I am a hound, huffing my bouts of hot air in search for a particular scent to show its face through all the others. I've been searching for his scent since the day I last saw him. Billowy has never been washed, for I refuse to wash it; I refuse to let the water soak into the cotton and pull him away from its threads; I refuse to empty the ash tray that holds the cigarette he smoked the night he held me for the first time; I refuse to let Oliver's presence dissipate. Have I gone mad? Maybe so. But if madness is the only conduit that connects me to Oliver, then madness it shall be. 

Oh la muvi star, you are so far away now. You're starving Oliver, I know you are. Just eat. Just gorge yourself on me. Please. Take every bite you wish to take and do not be gentle with it, for I've been numb for so long and I just need you to help my nerves revive themselves. I know you can do it, so just do it. Take me Oliver, I am yours and only yours. God, just come back. 

"Should've": it's past tense, spoken as an afterthought. "Should've" is the word used when an opportunity wraps itself around your tongue, but you wash it down before it can materialize into actual words and phrases and actions. I washed down far too much. I should've done a lot of things with Oliver. I should've done a lot of things with Oliver that my bed—his bed— in our Italian villa couldn't have handled; things that would've made my life different, but maybe different would be better. I think about all of the things I should've said to him. Does that even matter now? Does it even matter that I never told him I loved him? Do my feelings even matter? No, to him my feelings and my body are contraband that must be smuggled and hidden; to him I am a secret, a "hush now don't be so loud because if anyone hears us my entire life will be ruined and I'll flee to some faraway land and become a hermit" secret. Even still, I am not angry at him for this. God, how could I ever be angry at him?

Our relationship is a bomb in his hands, but a flower in mine. If he falters, the bomb explodes and its fragments will stick to everything and cause wounds and death and destruction; however, if I falter, I pick the flower back up and caress its petals, because one simple fault cannot destroy such a beautiful flower, can it? I have so many questions, so many things I'd like to know, but I'll be left to wonder unless he finds me. 

Find me Oliver. These questions are too much. I can't ask my father's ghost to read me a story anymore than I can ask you for a kiss. It feels as if you are gone too. If I could get on my knees and plead for you I would. Just find me. Find me. Find me. Find me.  
Find me.  
Find me.  
Find me.  
Per favore, la mia stella del cinema, trovami e potremmo guidare le nostre bici nell'oblio.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope y’all enjoyed! I’ll keep posting if there’s a want for it, but if not I’ll probably post anyway. I’m obsessed with CMBYN and I cannot wait for the sequel!


End file.
